News Round Up: Latest Hotfixes (August 10), Blizz on Character Limits

Latest hotfixes have been posted, including a previously undocumented change to the dailies for the Molten Front, which were hotfixed with the patch earlier this week. Instead of one elemental spawning, three now spawn; this should make getting the achievement way easier as many people still didn't have it (despite doing the dailies every day). It was completely RNG and some servers didn't even have an elemental switch yet.

Quests & Creatures

3 different elementals spawn on any given day for the Death From Above achievement, up from 1.

Character Limits

Blizzard discussed why players can't have a higher character limit on accounts.

It has always been a matter of efficiency in data service. Much like the fabrication of a commercial airplane, the design of the server side of a service like World of Warcraft affects what can be provided to the players for as long as that service is being used.

With an airplane, you can conceivably add more seats inside. You can squeeze more people in there, to a point. But you can't (easily) expand the hull to make room for more seats. Over the long run, if the airline wants to accommodate more people, they add more planes to the route, or replace an existing plane with a larger plane that has room for more seats.

This request - which is heard loud and clear, by the way - is like asking the airline to simultaneously increase the number of passengers that can be carried on every plane in their fleet. Can it be done? Absolutely. It may be something that we are able to do, and soon. It may not be, because providing reliable data service is extremely important to us.

Comments

Comment by LordBalrog

Point is, Blizzard, and Activision understand that while it is an often requested feature, as long as there's a way to pay for the same thing, they'd much rather keep it that way.

While I sympathize with your feelings on this matter, I don't think this particular issue is one where Blizzard's profiteering nature is the deciding factor.

A modest increase in the number of characters allowed, say 2 more per realm, wouldn't put much of a dent in the demand for additional accounts. It is much more likely that it is another legacy technology issue, another of the symptoms of WoW's ancient age by digital standards.

Comment by Interest

on 2011-08-11T14:56:53-05:00

Druids that shapeshift will now clear the Potion of Illusion buff.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Combustion damage from Ignite is no longer penalized by Resilience more than once, nor can it gain double benefit from Flashburn (mastery).

I was wondering what they'd do about the double dipping of that design.

If a player is kicked by vote from a dungeon finder group, the leader of the group is no longer able to invite that player back.

Good. I've had a few people who grief do that sort of thing.

3 different elementals spawn on any given day for the Death From Above achievement, up from 1.

Thank you so much for removing the stupidity of RNG from that.

The Burning Treants summoned by the Druid of the Flame now disappear when the summoner is captured.

It has always been a matter of efficiency in data service. Much like the fabrication of a commercial airplane, the design of the server side of a service like World of Warcraft affects what can be provided to the players for as long as that service is being used.

With an airplane, you can conceivably add more seats inside. You can squeeze more people in there, to a point. But you can't (easily) expand the hull to make room for more seats. Over the long run, if the airline wants to accommodate more people, they add more planes to the route, or replace an existing plane with a larger plane that has room for more seats.

This request - which is heard loud and clear, by the way - is like asking the airline to simultaneously increase the number of passengers that can be carried on every plane in their fleet. Can it be done? Absolutely. It may be something that we are able to do, and soon. It may not be, because providing reliable data service is extremely important to us.

I have zero problem with the 50 character limit.

HOWEVER...

What would be nice is if Realms didn't have a 10-character limit.

Comment by kaytie

on 2011-08-11T18:47:00-05:00

Or an analogy so easily led drones like yourself could agree and defend when others rightfully understand Blizzards true meaning as:"We don't want to put more seats in the plane (higher character limit), because we'd prefer more planes on the route (buying secondary accounts)."

Actually, the point was that they want to put more planes on the route - planes being servers - rather than have people squashed into overhead bins and breaking their legs every time they try to squeeze on over to the toilet.

Comment by pnkflffytutu

on 2011-08-11T19:49:07-05:00

I have no problem with the 10 character limit it's fine, but that is only because there are 10 classes. If they add another class I want another Character Slot. Blizzard did upgrade their servers before Cata went live. The only servers that MIGHT have trouble with increasing it by say 1 is a heavily overpopulated server and on those servers they could just offer free transfers.

Comment by LordBalrog

on 2011-08-11T21:33:01-05:00

I have no problem with the 10 character limit it's fine, but that is only because there are 10 classes. If they add another class I want another Character Slot. Blizzard did upgrade their servers before Cata went live. The only servers that MIGHT have trouble with increasing it by say 1 is a heavily overpopulated server and on those servers they could just offer free transfers.

Its not a hardware problem, its a software problem. Certain fundamental bits of WoW's code are difficult to change without messing up a bunch of other things, requiring that much more work to fix. Apparently the number of characters per realm is one of those things.

Comment by Eralson

on 2011-08-11T22:26:13-05:00

What people are wanting is to be allowed the use of all of their 50 slots on one server instead of spread around 5 to 50 servers. Pretty much, it's not HOW MUCH data is used, but WHERE that data is stored.

I have ten characters on my server, and no characters on any other server. If I could create more characters on my server, I probably would. But I'm not particularly tempted to make additional characters on other servers. I think this is pretty typical. If they kept the total character limit at 50 but removed the per-server limit, it's likely that the total number of characters would increase significantly. And I suspect that character data constitutes most of the storage on a server. Really, what else is there to keep track of? Raid and dungeon lockouts, auction listings, guild stuff...that's about it, I think.

The thing is, Google gives us over 7 GB of mail storage space for free. I don't know how much storage a WOW character takes, but I doubt that even 50 characters would come close to that. Unless they have very expensive high-performance storage devices, I'm having a hard time coming up with a plausible explanation for how this could be an issue.

As it stands, I believe, each character is copied on each world server updating upon zone change. This cuts down load times and gives us a "world" we can pass through seamlessly. The alternative would be to have character dedicated servers where all characters are stored, but we may have to deal with load times when changing zones.